List of people considered father or mother of a scientific field

The following is a list of people considered to be "father" or "mother" (or "founding father" or "founding mother") of a scientific field. Such people are generally regarded to have made the first significant contributions to and/or delineation of that field; they may also be seen as "a" rather than "the" father or mother of the field. Debate over who merits the title can be perennial. As regards science itself, the title has been bestowed on the ancient Greek philosophers Thales[1][2] – who attempted to explain natural phenomena without recourse to mythology – and Democritus, the seminal atomist.[3]

Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances (1923) and Modern Thermodynamics by the Methods of Willard Gibbs (1933), which made a major contribution to the use of thermodynamics in chemistry.

"Justus Von Liebig, the 'father of modern nutrition', developed the perfect infant food. It consisted of [...]"[70]

"In addition to being known as the Father of Modern Chemistry, Lavoisier is also considered the Father of Modern Nutrition, as the first to discover the metabolism that occurs inside the human body..."[71]

Performed the first human liver transplant and established the clinical utility of anti-rejection drugs including ciclosporin. Developed major advances in organ preservation, procurement and transplantation.

"It delighted the heart of our old friend Bernarr Macfadden, 'the Father of Physical Culture,' when we told him how much athletic activity and good sportsmanship had to do with the rehabilitation of boys."[76]

Zhukovsky was the first to undertake the study of airflow, was the first engineer scientist to explain mathematically the origin of aerodynamic lift. Cayley Investigated theoretical aspects of flight and experimented with flight a century before the first airplane was built

Leavitt Discovered Cepheid variables, the "Standard Candle" by which Hubble later determined galactic distances. Einstein's general theory of relativity is usually recognized as the theoretic foundation of modern cosmology.

Author of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and groundbreaking economist, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking. Prior to Keynes, the general consensus among economists was that the economy was self-fixing. During the Great Depression, when people began to realize that the economy would not fix itself, Keynes proposed that the government needed to intervene to combat excessive boom and bust. This idea was the largest influence in FDR's New Deal.[162][163]

"Irving Fisher [...] spent his career studying questions about money and the economy - how money affects interest rates, how money affects inflation, and the impact of money on overall economic activity. For this work, he is regarded as the father of monetary economics."[166]

"[...] no less an authority than the University of Chicago's Milton Friedman, the father of monetary economics, [...]"[167]

Founded the American Association of Home Economics, currently the American Association of Family & Consumer Sciences. "Bringing science into the home, Richards hoped to "...attain the best physical, mental, and moral development" for the family, which she believed was the basic unit of civilization."[179]

^Darwin, Charles (1842, published 1909), "Pencil Sketch of 1842", in Darwin, Francis, The foundations of The origin of species: Two essays written in 1842 and 1844., Cambridge University Press, <http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID = F1556&viewtype=text&pageseq=1> Retrieved on 2006-12-15

^Jacob Darwin Hamblin (2005). Science in the Early Twentieth Century: An Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. p. 9. ISBN9781851096657. His interest in both fields would serve him well, because he became a principal founder of physical chemistry.|accessdate= requires |url= (help)

^Grammaticos, P. C.; Diamantis, A. (2008). "Useful known and unknown views of the father of modern medicine, Hippocrates and his teacher Democritus". Hellenic journal of nuclear medicine11 (1): 2–4. PMID18392218.edit

^Bernard, Claude. An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, 1865. First English translation by Henry Copley Greene, published by Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1927; reprinted in 1949. The Dover Edition of 1957 is a reprint of the original translation with a new Foreword by I. Bernard Cohen of Harvard University.

^Perrot, Pierre (1998). A to Z of Thermodynamics. Oxford University Press. ISBN0-19-856552-6.

^Solomon Gandz (1936), The sources of al-Khwarizmi's algebra, Osiris I, p. 263–277: "In a sense, Khwarizmi is more entitled to be called the father of algebra than Diophantus, because Khwarizmi is the first to teach algebra in an elementary form and for its own sake, Diophantus is primarily concerned with the theory of numbers."

^Boyer, Carl B. (1991). "The Arabic Hegemony". A History of Mathematics (Second Edition ed.). John Wiley & Sons, Inc. p. 228. ISBN0-471-54397-7. Diophantus sometimes is called "the father of algebra," but this title more appropriately belongs to al-Khwarizmi. It is true that in two respects the work of al-Khwarizmi represented a retrogression from that of Diophantus. First, it is on a far more elementary level than that found in the Diophantine problems and, second, the algebra of al-naren is thoroughly rhetorical, with none of the syncopation found in the Greek Arithmetica or in Brahmagupta's work. Even numbers were written out in words rather than symbols! It is quite unlikely that al-Khwarizmi knew of the work of Diophantus, but he must have been familiar with at least the astronomical and computational portions of Brahmagupta; yet neither al-Khwarizmi nor other Arabic scholars made use of syncopation or of negative numbers.

^Derbyshire, John (2006). "The Father of Algebra". Unknown Quantity: A Real And Imaginary History of Algebra. Joseph Henry Press. p. 31. ISBN0-309-09657-X. Diophantus, the father of algebra, in whose honor I have named this chapter, lived in Alexandria, in Roman Egypt, in either the 1st, the 2nd, or the 3rd century CE.

^Boyer (1991). "Greek Trigonometry and Mensuration". A History of Mathematics (Second Edition ed.). John Wiley & Sons, Inc. p. 162. ISBN0-471-54397-7. For some two and a half centuries, from Hippocrates to Eratosthenes, Greek mathematicians had studied relationships between lines and circles and had applied these in a variety of astronomical problems, but no systematic trigonometry had resulted. Then, presumably during the second half of the second century B.C., the first trigonometric table apparently was compiled by the astronomer Hipparchus of Nicaea (ca. 180-ca. 125 B.C.), who thus earned the right to be known as the father of trigonometry. Aristarchus had known that in a given circle the ratio of arc to chord decreases from 180° to 0°, tending toward a limit of 1. However, it appears that not until Hipparchus undertook the task had anyone tabulated corresponding values of arc and chord for a whole series of angles.

^Boyer's opinion may constructively be compared to Øystein Ore's opinion, that the Babylonians constructed trigonometric tables ca 1600 BCE (Ore (1988). "Diophantine Problems". Number Theory and its History. Dover Publications, Inc. pp. 176–179. ISBN0-486-65620-9. The tablet, catalogued as Plimpton 322, is composed in Old Babylonian script so that it must fall in the period from 1900 B.C. and 1600 B.C., at least a millennium before the Pythagoreans… It is evident, however, that at this early date the Babylonians not only had completely mastered the Pythagorean problem, but also had used it as the basis for the construction of trigonometric tables.)

^de la Rasilla de Moral, Ignacio (2013), "Notes for the History of new Approaches to International Legal Studies: Not a Map but Perhaps a Compass", in Beneyto, José María; Kennedy, David, New Approaches to International Law, Springer, pp. 225–248 [232], ISBN9789067048798, retrieved 2013-01-01, [...] the perennial debate on whether Vitoria was or not (contra James Brown Scott) the founding father of international law as a discipline or, instead, a 'primitive' scholarly precursor who did not distinguish between law and morality.

^Willcox, William Bradford; Arnstein, Walter L. (1966). The Age of Aristocracy, 1688 to 1830. Volume III of A History of England, edited by Lacey Baldwin Smith (Sixth Edition, 1992 ed.). Lexington, MA. p. 133. ISBN0-669-24459-7. Adam Ferguson of Edinburgh became "the father of modern sociology."

Carey (the passage to be looked up later) therefore denounces him as the father of communism.

"Mr. Ricardo's system is one of discords …its whole tends to the production of hostility among classes and nations… His hook is the true manual of the demagogue, who seeks power by means of agrarianism, war, and plunder." (H. C. Carey, The Past, the Present, and the Future, Philadelphia, 1848, pp. 74–75.)